A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
